Booby Quotes & Sayings

Watch out. Bras are often booby-trapped. — Tiffany Reisz

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom
which is bordered on all sides by isolation
is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet. — Saul Bellow

You're a booby," said William. "Booby yerself!" said Tom. — J.R.R. Tolkien

They were women then
My mama's generation
Husky of voice stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
MUST know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves. — Alice Walker

Now Bobby was sitting behind the reception desk in a peach-colored orderly's uniform, and he didn't look so tough. He also didn't look all that happy to see me. Probably didn't help that his laminated nametag said BOOBY. — Kami Garcia

Religion is not the hero of the day, but the zero. In any exposition of the products of brains, the Sunday-School takes the booby prize ... Man has asked for truth and the Church has given him miracles. He has asked for knowledge, and the Church has given him theology. He has asked for facts, and the Church has given him the Bible. This foolishness should stop. The Church has nothing to give man that has not been in cold storage for two thousand years. Anything would become stale in that time. — Marilla Ricker

The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels. — A.J. Liebling

I'd let him put his hand under my shirt, over the bra, where he kneaded with delighted disbelief at my booby. It had been super exciting, not really because it felt that great to have my booby treated like a yeast roll, but because we had both been so thrilled that I had let him touch it. — Joshilyn Jackson

Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows. — Tim O'Brien

I think about curses and pirates. Skeletons guarding booby-trapped hideaways. — Maria Dahvana Headley

This is so humiliating," I muttered as Cassidy wiggled out of her bra. "Well, it brings new meaning to the phrase 'booby trap,'" she teased, and we both laughed, a situation made infinitely more interesting due to the fact that she was topless. — Robyn Schneider

Even a perfect understanding of failed love is the booby prize. — Melissa Bank

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself.. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. — Tim O'Brien

In your dream you call for Chaplain Charlie. You met the Navy chaplain when you interviewed him for a feature article you were writing. Chaplain Charlie was an amateur magician. With his magic, Chaplain Charlie entertained Marines in sick bays and distributed spiritual tourniquets to men who were still alive, but weaponless. To brutal, godless children Chaplain Charlie spoke about how God is merciful, despite appearances, about how the Ten Commandments lack detail because when you're writing on stone tablets with lightning bolts you've got to be brief, about how the Free World will conquer Communism with aid of God and a few Marines, and about free fish. One day a Vietnamese child booby-trapped Chaplain Charlie's black bag of tricks. Chaplain Charlie reached in and pulled out a bright ball of death... — Gustav Hasford

Your wife is a psycho path. I wouldn't fuck her with your dick. She's probably pull some booby trap shit and shove some razor-blades up her twat to try and slice my cock off. — Emma Chase

A clever conjurer is welcome anywhere, and those of us whose powers of entertainment are limited to the setting of booby-traps or the arranging of apple-pie beds must view with envy the much greater tribute of laughter and applause which is the lot of the prestidigitator with some natural gift for legerdemain. — A.A. Milne

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped. — Marilyn Frye

Booby traps or fail-safes
Booby traps or fail-safes are dangerous internal events that are triggered to happen if the survivor investigates too much of his or her own training, and/or talks about or becomes aware of memories he or she (the front person) is not supposed to know. The effects of booby traps include such things as suicide attempts, serious self-harm, or falling into terrible depression. It is important to know that the overwhelming emotions experienced when a booby trap is set off actually belong to real, specific memories. A booby trap can be set off without the knowledge of the main outside personality. Because of such traps, it is very important to go very slowly in discovering what happened, if you are a survivor of this kind of abuse. Even though parts of you are involved in setting off the booby traps, they may not know the effects of what they are doing (pushing buttons, turning switches, and so forth), and it might be difficult to anticipate what will happen. — Alison Miller

I love that I am a woman with booby traps — Gillian Flynn

Everybody nose dive, hold your breath, count to five. Back slap, booby trap, cover it up in bubble wrap. Room shake, earth quake, find a way to stay awake. It's going to blow, it's going to break, this is more than I can take. — Peter Gabriel

In life, understanding is the booby prize. — Werner Erhard

I am not talking about the American people and the British people, I am talking about those mercenaries ... They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

The route to our highest hopes tends to run right through some dark, booby-trapped places. A girl needs a map and a light to steer her; she might need a flamethrower or a cannon as well. She might need a pirate lover. — Sharon Pywell

Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they're obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.

"Can we be very clear," Polly Cradle murmurs, "that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?"

Joe swallows. "Yes, we can," he says carefully.

"There will therefore be no more 'Say hello, Polly'?"

"There will not. — Nick Harkaway

With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause. — Francine Prose

He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time. — Rupert Thomson

Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits. — Alan Sillitoe

It's a really nice house..."
"Yeah, full of booby traps and cameras and little robots that pop out of the closets at night and murder you in your sleep."
She burst out laughing. "Good point. — Elle Kennedy

Wisdom is the booby prize given when you've been unwise. — Piet Pieterszoon Hein

A booby woos his mate with a story of abundance; a bee dances out a story of food. Whatever line we draw between instinct and awareness does not change that the story is there from the outset, long before there are poets to recite it or scribes to record it. So it is that what we still think of as our unique heritage, the thing that sets us apart, what the gods have given us, the magic moment of "Let there be light," is perhaps only a passage on a much longer journey, one that is primal beyond reckoning and that goes back to the very beginnings of life itself. — Nino Ricci

Why isn't a bra called a booby-trap? — Lynne Parker

DI Cartwright: The cat is booby trapped? DI Quill: Welcome to my world. — Paul Cornell

In one afternoon, my entire life shattered and then all of a sudden this great guy comes along like some
mythical knight in shining armor. He's gorgeous, loaded, and says all the right things to me. He makes me
feel like I can fly, and every time he shows up, he makes everything better. I'm not used to this, okay?
And I'm not used to being with a guy who is so incredibly sexy that he makes me feel like the booby
prize. - Bride — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no ... when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart ... and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape ... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth - then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth. — Walt Whitman

Avoid Calcutta's un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown. — James O'Reilly

This is where you first failed us. You gave us minds and told us not to think. You gave us curiosity and put a booby-trapped tree right in front of us. You gave us sex and told us not to do it. You played three-card monte with our souls from day one, and when we couldn't find the queen, you sent us to Hell to be tortured for eternity. That was your great plan for humanity? All you gave us here was daisies and fairy tales and you acted like that was enough. How were we supposed to resist evil when you didn't even tell us about it? — Richard Kadrey

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths. — Sinclair Lewis

I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service. I do not do booby traps. — Ally Carter

We've decided to wake a miss for you because you are nice. We want a booby as roomful as ours.
Everybody had seen the Hobgoblin laugh, but nobody believed he could smile. He was so happy that you could see it all over him
from his hat to his boots! Without a word he waved his cloak over the grass
and behold! Once more the garden was filled with a pink light and there on the grass before them lay a twin to the King's Ruby
the Queen's Ruby. — Tove Jansson

She poked him in the center of his chest with two fingers to punctuate her words.
"You are an unfeeling" - poke - "traitorous" - poke - "mistrusting" - poke - "rude" - poke - "booby!"
Every poke turned him mortal, but Lord Maccon didn't seem to mind it in the least. Instead he grabbed the hand that poked him and brought it to his lips. "You put it very well, my love. — Gail Carriger

I understand that it's the music that keeps me alive ... That's my lifeblood. And to give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses - that's not the American dream. That's the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them - if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself - then you've been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you're not careful, for selling yourself out, or letting the best of yourself slip away. — Bruce Springsteen

I still didn't know quite what the witches were capable of. The threshold could be booby-trapped or enchanted. I could be walking into a cage fight with a demon. Hell, she could open the door with a Glock 9 in her hand and put a bullet in my ear, or throw a cat at me, or call me a damn hippie. — Kevin Hearne

It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape. — Diane Arbus

Excuse me, Abigail, but whose shift did she get away during?' Townsend asked with a glare.
'Excuse me, Townsend, but who was supposed to booby-trap the doors?'
'I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service,' Townsend said, indignant. 'I do not do booby traps. — Ally Carter

Oh, I'm fine! People booby-trap DHDs that I'm working on every day!" Rodney paused. "Actually, that's truer than I'd like. — Jo Graham

The authority of the civil defense ... issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to know? — Eugene Ionesco

People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people
as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped. — Kurt Vonnegut

Catholicism - all the perversions of Christianity - is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologize and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity? — Martin Booth

The trombone and side-drums in the chamber music of Stravinsky will do well enough in a very smart house-party where all the conversation is carried on in an esoteric family slang and the guests are expected to enjoy booby-traps. Very different is the outlook of some of our younger masters such as Hindemith, Jarnach, and others, whose renunciation of beauty was in itself a youthfully romantic gesture, and was accompanied by endless pains in securing adequate performance. The work of masterly performers can indeed alone save the new ideas from being swamped in a universal dullness which no external smartness can long distinguish from that commemorated in the Dunciad. — Donald Francis Tovey

The booby father craves a booby son, And by Heaven's blessing thinks himself undone. — Edward Young

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel. — Robert Burns

I don't know," I said, exasperated. "What else do you have in your wacked-out world? Heat sensors? Mine fields? Dirigibles? Booby traps? Machine guns? Shrink rays? What?"
"Aside from dirigibles, which are rather expensive and rare outside of trade routes, most of what you just said made no sense whatsoever," he said, as delighted as a child hearing a foreign language for the first time. "But it all sounds very dangerous. And fun. Especially the part about the boobies. — Delilah S. Dawson

What a dumb accident a family was. Some people got lucky, some not so lucky, and some people got the booby prize. — Laura Ruby

Too often we don't call out a wrong or expect ourselves or others to act with routine integrity, excellence, or love. There has been a worldwide failure in leadership, birthing an apathetic populace, unjustifiable poverty, unconscionable greed, and a globe ravaged and booby-trapped by war. — Brendon Burchard

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself
by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true. — H.L. Mencken

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me. — Yusef Komunyakaa

The world is philosophically booby-trapped; touch an interesting subject, and it just might blow up in your face. Some say it's better not to touch. — Michael Leunig

Somebody could send you an office document or a PDF file, and as soon as you open it, it's a booby trap and the hacker has complete control of your computer. Another major problem is password management. People use the same password on multiple sites, so when the hacker compromises one site, they have your password for everywhere else. — Kevin Mitnick

There are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a coxcomb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove. — Henry MacKenzie

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. — Bill Bryson

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to ... For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them
who were above such trifling. — Henry David Thoreau

Chubi, rhymes with booby, which you don't have, or doodie, which your face looks like, she said smugly, leaning back and making her chair squeak. — Kim Harrison